When Diameter nodes, such as Diameter agents and Diameter clients, need to route a Diameter request message to a next hop peer and the request message does not contain a destination host attribute value pair (AVP) or the host name in the destination host AVP is not directly connected to the Diameter node, Diameter realm-based routing is used to route the request to the next hop Diameter peer. Diameter nodes use the application ID and the destination realm AVP values to determine the next hop Diameter peer. If there are multiple peers serving the same realm, i.e., if there are multiple Diameter connections available for routing the Diameter requests, then the Diameter node needs to distribute the requests across all available Diameter peer connections.
One possible implementation for distributing Diameter requests across available peers include using a static preconfigured percentage of traffic distribution across peers, such as a round-robin algorithm. However, percentage-based distribution requires Diameter nodes to keep track of the number of messages sent to each peer per application ID. In addition, percentage-based distribution does not account for the actual load on each of the Diameter peers.
Accordingly, there exists a need for improved methods, systems, and computer readable media for realm-based routing of Diameter request messages.